


'good' as a strict progression of cause to effect

by LieutenantSaavik



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: (and personally i think that's pretty nifty), F/M, M/M, VAULT GANG, bill potts (true to form) is gay, missy (true to form) is the worst person in your philosophy class, nardole (true to form) is just... there, the doctor (true to form) is uhhhhh. You Know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-25
Updated: 2019-11-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 20:34:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21554980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LieutenantSaavik/pseuds/LieutenantSaavik
Summary: She spits it out. “Doctor, do you actually believe I can change?”There’s a long silence. Missy covers her face with her hand.Eventually, the Doctor replies. “Sometimes,” he says, voice low and reluctant, “Very rarely, impossible things just happen, and we call them miracles.”“Impossible things,” Missy echoes. She lets out a bitter laugh. “Would it really be an impossible thing?”“It would,” the Doctor says, with genuine pity. “Wouldn’t it?”
Relationships: Missy & Bill Potts, The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Twelfth Doctor/Missy
Comments: 62
Kudos: 64





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [babybel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/babybel/gifts).



Basically, there was this giant alien-looking vault in the basement of St. Luke’s University, and Bill decided to check it out.

Basically, she accidentally opened it herself—or helped the person inside it get it open—and found herself face-to-face with a really angry, really unhinged, and unfortunately kinda sexy madwoman in the middle of a full-blown moral dilemma.

Basically, said madwoman dragged Bill into said vault and started using her as a sounding-board for said moral dilemma. 

Basically, Bill is so flummoxed she’s allowing it to happen.

“Is perfect good achievable?” the woman asks, pacing back and forth in front of a giant piano. She flaps her hand in Bill’s direction. “Sit down and listen to me, human-girl-creature-thing.” She pauses. “Oh. Introductions. I’m Missy, I don’t like you, I don’t like any humans, I’m a Time-Lady so I don’t have to, I don’t like being locked up in here, I don’t like fish fingers or custard or compassion but I’m currently in the middle of a crisis and _someone_ is going to counsel me through it, and you’re convenient and fairly quiet, so—”

“Oho _ho_ ,” says Bill, pointedly loud. “I’m _not_ quiet. My name’s—”

“I don’t care. Is anyone ever perfectly selfless? No.” Missy continues pacing, her crisp skirt swirling against her ankles. “So how can you be a good person if you can never _fully_ be a good person? Simple, you’re ‘good’ if you do more good than bad, but who judges good from bad? Who decides that?”

Bill shrugs. “Uh, god?”

“Been all over, never met her. And do some actions weigh more than others? If you do a big good thing, how many small bad things can you do until it evens out? Can you even it out? Can you do something so good that forever afterward you’re a good person? Can you do something so _bad_ that forever afterward you’re a bad person? And is that me, then?”

Bill just sort of blinks at her. 

“What I want to know,” Missy clarifies, punctuating every word, “Is Can I Be Good.”

Bill blinks at her some more.

“People," Missy goes on, "Assume that ‘good’ is a strict progression of cause to effect, but from an amoral, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, goody-woody... stuff.”

“Alright,” says Bill, “You’re just fucking crazy.”

“Yes.” Missy flashes her a distinctly nasty smile. “You’re catching on. Now be quiet. If you spend years— _years_ , Clara—”

“I’m not Clara.”

“I can’t tell the difference.”

“My name’s Bill.”

“A century, let’s say. If you spend a century doing horrible things, and you feel bad and want to be good, can you be good?”

Bill throws her hands in the air. “I DON’T KNOW WHO YOU ARE.”

“Is there any way to be a good person after you’ve killed, say, fifty people? What if you save fifty people, does it even out then? Doesn’t change the fact the first fifty are still dead. What if you save fifty one? What if you save a hundred? What if you,” Missy’s voice turns wistful, “Just save one?”

Bill shrugs again and resigns herself to sit through this, since it’s more entertaining than anything else she’s done today. “Then you’ve improved, I guess.”

“Thank you.” Missy looks legitimately pleased. “I knew it. But then there’s this crying business I keep doing, and the word ‘atonement.’ It means ‘turning’ in one of your—I don’t know, one of your ancient languages.” She pinches the bridge of her nose and somehow manages to make even that look dramatic. “If being bad is one path and being good is one path, can you turn from one onto the other? And as soon as you’re on the ‘good path,’ are you good?” And off Bill’s look of blank irritation, “Phrased otherwise, can you be better just by wanting to be?”

“Dunno.”

“Or even just by wanting to want to be?”

Bill puzzles this out in her head. “I guess. If there even is a ‘good path.’ I don’t think it’s as absolute as all that, personally. Like, something that isn't ‘a good thing’ isn’t necessarily ‘a bad thing,’ and vice versa. We all do a lot of boring stuff. Neutral actions.”

“The Doctor might ask if there even is such a thing as a neutral action.”

Oh, of course this woman knows the Doctor. “The Doctor might ask a lot of things. He never,” Bill points out, “Shuts up. But I think me sitting at a table listening to podcasts and searching for a tissue because I need to use it, which is what I was doing an hour ago, is pretty neutral.”

Missy raises her eyebrows. “You humans fill your days with such scintillating tasks.”

“Oh?” Bill gestures to the frighteningly barren vault. “Frankly, I doubt you’ve got any ‘scintillating tasks’ either.” She looks around more seriously. “Wow, what _do_ you do in here?”

“The Doctor, mostly.”

Bill groans. “’Course.”

“But undeniably—listen to me!—there are routes.”

Bill folds her arms. If this is a game she has to play, she’ll win it. (Interestingly, Missy is thinking the same thing). “How so?”

“If you kill an ant, it’s easier to kill a bee. If you kill a bee, it’s easier to kill a bird. If you kill a bird, it’s easier to kill a rat. And so on and so forth, until you’re killing people.”

Bill stares at Missy flatly. “That’s a _little_ extreme.”

“Stealing, then. If you steal a pen, it’s easier to steal a lipstick. And then a TARDIS, perhaps, and then the Doctor’s hearts. See?”

“Yeah, sure. Not sure about that last bit.”

“But I am right.”

Bill narrows her eyes and suppresses a tiny smile. “You’re telling me you actually care what I think?”

Missy peers at her. “No,” she says unconvincingly.

Bill’s smile splits into a grin. “You want a human to validate you? Seriously? I thought you hated us.”

“I don’t _hate_ you. Spiders don’t hate flies.”

Bill’s face falls. “You _eat_ us?!” she half-shrieks.

Missy gives her a look of genuine horror. “No!”

“Oh.” Bill relaxes; that’s some relief. “You just think we’re,” she draws heavy airquotes, “‘Cosmically inferior,’ or something.”

Missy nods soberly. “I think you look like insects.” She straightens up, prepares to justify herself as Bill prepares to tune her out. “See, standing here, regarding you,” Missy explains, “I am physically incapable of seeing you as my equal.”

Bill groans. “You’d _better_ not be racist.”

“No, just species-ist.You’ve lived, what, two decades? I’ve lived over a thousand years. I have lived longer, seen more, known more, done more. There is simply more of me,” she says lightly, “Than there is of you.”

Bill’s eyes widen in amused stupefaction. “A long life, that makes you superior?” She shakes her head. “Oof. My grandma would love that.”

“I come from the planet that tamed Time. I have had dominion over death. I have seen and grasped and comprehend the _universe_. And you have, what, listened to podcasts? Picked tissues out of boxes? Slept for a third of your life? That life,” she twists her fingers through the air as if wringing a neck, “That life is so _small_.”

“Not my fault,” says Bill flatly. “I’m doing the best I can with what I have, same as anyone. Same as everyone. I don’t have two hearts or a TARDIS, but what I do have is just as much right to be here as you. More, actually. ’S my planet, not yours. And if you were to ask me, you can fuck right off of it.”

“Trust me, I’d love to.” Missy looks almost grieved; she scrutinises Bill for an uncomfortable moment, then abruptly sits back. “No,” she says, almost disappointed. “No. I really can’t see how you’re important at all.” She flashes a wicked grin. “I tried, though.”

Bill realises something. “I really hate you.”

“And I don’t care.”

“Sure you don’t.”

“I really don’t. I’ve been to the furthest fathoms of space. Your whole life, it means nothing.” She waggles her fingers. “Everything you are, gone like breath in a mirror. Any second now.”

Bill sighs. “You’re sickening, you know that, right?”

“I do,” says Missy seriously. “Oh, I do. That’s the trouble with it.”

“No,” says Bill. “You wanted my answer? It’s no. No, you’re not capable of being good. You’re gross. You’re flat fucking evil.”

She turns to go. She manages four steps.

“I’m going to die,” Missy says.

Bill stops. “So am I, eventually,” she says uncertainly. “You mean... soon?”

“Think so.” Missy nods and smoothes her hands down her skirt as Bill turns to look at her. “Sometime in the next, I don’t know, twenty years. Before I’m uncaged, I mean. Before I get out of this vault.” She spreads her hands, then steeples her fingers. “Curtains.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m the one who will do it. Who has done it, actually. It’s like a poem.” She pitches her voice up two octaves. “I’ll kill him. He’ll kill me.”

“And then the Doctor will come in and get killed multiple times and then mmm-whatcha-say will start playing?” When Missy makes no reaction, “It’s an SNL sketch. You’d probably like it. Do you get Wi-Fi in here?”

“No.”

“Ouch.”

“Exactly.” Missy’s eyes are sharp. “How do you know the Doctor?”

“I’m his student.”

“Oh, so you’re his latest acquisition.”

“I don’t belong to anyone.”

“That’s what I thought; now I’m trapped in a cage. Will the Doctor always be better than me?”

“Like, morally?”

Missy nods.

“I’m going out on a limb here, because I don’t know exactly what you’ve done—”

“Murder, lots.” She grins. “I’ve burned planets.”

“Then I’m gonna say _probably_.”

Missy humphs. “At least when _I_ was nine-hundred I never kissed a teenager.”

“Hey!” says Bill, a bit defensive on the Doctor’s behalf. “It wasn’t like that. And she _was_ twenty!”

Missy flops down on the piano bench, crosses her legs, and rests her chin on her hand. “What a relief; she was twenty.”

“He told me about her! Rose Tyler, yeah? He really loved her, keeps a picture of her in his desk. I think it’s sweet. Anyway, two consenting adults and all that, regardless. Plus,” Bill remembers, “She stared into the Time-Vortex. That’s gotta age someone a bit.”

“Ah yes, the Time Vortex. I saw it too, when I was a child,” Missy fumes. “Only I was forced up to it by the people I trusted. Led like a lad to the slaughter.”

“Lamb to the slaughter,” Bill corrects.

“I’m more of a wolf myself.”

“Oh, fursona?”

Missy stares at her. “I don’t think I have ever hated a human more.”

“Um, thanks?”

Missy turns to the side. “Am I going to be good because I want to be,” she muses, her mind changing tracks already, “Or am I going to be good because he wants me to be good? And Is that submission?”

“Submission?” Bill's first thought is ‘submission’ as in ‘submission-of-an-essay-two-days-past-the-deadline,’ which, in fairness, she’s only done once.

“I don’t want,” Missy says, “To _submit_ to the Doctor. I want it the other way around, in fact. I tell him, each time he comes in here—”

“He comes in here?”

“Yes.” The ‘yes’ implies something Bill thankfully doesn’t catch.

“Oh,” says Bill. And then, “OH!”

Missy narrows her eyes. “What?”

“This is where he hops off to, then, when his phone goes off! He sets this obnoxious alarm thing every day to remind him to go do something.” Bill looks at Missy a bit apologetically. “I’m not sure he enjoys it much. I asked about what the reminder was for and he told me ‘just a chore,’ so I thought he just had to wash dishes or clean out Nardole’s brain or something.”

Missy bristles. “Just a chore?”

“Yeah, that’s what he said.” Bill pauses as a new thought occurs to her. “Uh," she says. "Does the Doctor know you’ve, like... killed people?”

Missy raises her chin. “Yes.”

“That’s weird.”

“Why?”

“Cuz then…” Bill tries to put it in words. “The Doctor… I mean, you know the Doctor! He’s got all these things he stands for, things I stand for, too. And you’re bad, and he knows it, but he still comes around to you. Every day, he comes around to you, right?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“He has to. We’re the last of the Time-Lords.” Missy smirks. “Bit of a bond.” After a second, her face sours. “He never mentioned me?”

“No. But what do you mean, ‘last of the Time-Lords’? Wasn’t your planet saved?”

“To dumb it down to your level, it was spliced back to its original co-ordinates, placed one second out of sync with proper time, and left at the end of the universe.”

“Just kind of dumped there?”

“Yes.”

“Bit rude, to dump a planet,” Bill remarks. 

“I found it afterward. Me, alone. The Doctor never worried his pretty head about it, too preoccupied with his darling Clara and you scurrying lot. I used to think he was half-human, he was so obsessed. So yes, Gallifrey was ‘saved,’ if you must use that word. But it was stripped.”

“Stripped?”

“Gutted, scarred, dégradée—that’s Spanish for ‘degraded.’ Stuck, half-slaughtered, its species left bereft of their greatest skill. Some might say their only,” she adds, wry. “A second out of sync means no more time travel. No more time travel means no more Time-Lords. Just Gallifreyans in funny collars, now.” She shrugs as if it doesn’t affect her. “It’s what they deserve. ‘Know everything, do nothing’ was always their creed. Now they’ve got their wish: the Tardises are gone.” She snaps her fingers. “Blown to shrapnel.”

“I think the plural of Tardis should be Tardii,” says Bill, unmoved. Then: “Were you there?”

“There?”

“For the,” Bill flaps her hand in the air, “The Star War.”

“The Time-War,” Missy corrects.

“This is all so stupid. Do you just stick ‘Time’ in front of every word you use? Time-war. Time-travel. Time-tot. Time-Lord.”

“Time-Lady,” Missy corrects. “And what’s the alternative?”

“You do realise ‘Time-Lady’ sounds even dumber?”

Missy purses her lips. “Where are you going with this?”

“I’m just curious!”

“Terrible flaw.”

“I want to know if you were there.”

“Yes,” Missy confesses, her eyes flicking away from Bill’s face. “I was. Briefly.”

Bill kicks her foot into the floor. “What was it… like?”

“It was a _war_.”

“Meaning?”

“Death everywhere.”

“Not keen to revisit it, are you?”

“What is the purpose of this?” Missy asks, snappishly. “You want more details? Fine. Time-Lords with their skulls snapped, their heads blown off, no regeneration. Glowing limbs in the gutters, in the gulleys, some of them still twitching, some of them attached to these great bloody pools that reeked when you stepped in them, that soaked into your shoes. The wounded rotting where they fell. The lucky ones incinerated. Hair burned. Flesh burned. Glass melted. Ashes and gashes and gore,” she says sarcastically, her voice brittle with memory. “Oh my!” 

Bill is silent for a long moment, picturing it. “Do you bleed red?” she finally asks. “Like humans?”

“Humans bleed red like Time-Lords.”

“So yes.”

“Yes.”

“And you’d know because you fought, yeah?”

“No.”

Bill blinks. “Seriously?”

“The Doctor fought. I…” she bites her lip coyly. “Ran off.”

“You can burn any planet but your own, then, huh.”

“And the Doctor _can’t_ burn any planet but his own. He’s sweet like that. He _is_ very sweet. Yes,” she continues, smug, “I get bored in here, and he does periodically oblige me.”

“Way more information than I wanted, thanks.”

“You asked!”

“I didn’t! God,” Bill rolls her eyes, “You’re clingier than my first girlfriend.” Missy seems to perk up; Bill sighs. “Yes, I’m a lesbian.”

“How quaint. Me too.”

Bill scoffs. “You’re shagging the Doctor.”

Missy pouts. “He’s butch.”

“He’s a man.”

“He’s _very_ butch.”

Bill opens her mouth to protest, then just shrugs.

“The Doctor was my first girlfriend,” Missy goes on. “Yes, I think he was a girl back then. I’m fairly sure that I was, too.” She sways from side to side, then stills. “It was a long time ago, though.”

Bill thinks of Heather for a brief but painful flash. “Must suck that it all fell apart.”

“Did it?”

“I mean, you’re scary and awful now.”

“Not to him!” Missy looks affronted. “I’m _good_ for him! I make him _better_ , you see. In many ways, I _define_ him.”

“What? How?”

Missy regards Bill and begins explaining very slowly, with lots of patronising hand-gestures thrown in. “Until I say, ‘the basic law of the universe is that one must rule or serve,’ he can’t say ‘I want to see the universe, not rule it.’ See?”

“Nope.” If Bill had gum, she would have popped it.

“When I take a stand, he takes a stand against me; I throw him into sharp relief. He calls me a monster—do you know where that word comes from? ‘Monstrare,’ in Latin. ‘To show.’”

“All I’m getting is that you’re both just really bad philosophers.”

“No!” Missy exclaims, then, “Well, yes, a little. My point is, we _balance_. The universe practically _requires_ me to attack him. Or fuck him, whichever he prefers. Both at the same time, perhaps, if I’m remembering 1971 correctly. It’s not that difficult to understand.”

Bill, thoroughly skeeved out, doesn’t know how to react to all this, so she lets out an eloquent “HUH.”

“It’s why I can’t stay good, though, properly,” Missy reflects. “Well, one reason.”

“Cosmic equivalent of too much weight on one end of a see-saw?”

“Could be, yes.”

“I think you’re kinda underestimating the amount of evil in the universe that exists without you,” Bill offers. “But even if you’re not, you can always try.”

“What if I did,” says Missy dreamily. “And what if I succeeded? What if I just changed? What then?” She hums a single note. “Spend another thousand years trying to save as many people as I’ve killed, and then one more? That is what I’d have to do to...” she gestures to herself, “To honour this, here, what I’m doing now.”

“I’m glad you see that. Kinda bare minimum, but…”

Missy wasn’t hearing her. “It’s easy enough to _not do_ bad. It’s a different thing to _do_ good. I could never make up for it, the lives I’ve taken; I’m clever enough to know that. And I know that one good action is nothing.” She pauses, nods to herself. “But one good action with a death, that’s not. Dying for good, that’s power—that’s why the Doctor keeps doing it. Someday, I know it’ll _stick_ , his death. And that does scare me.” She smiles, clean and masking. “But I’ll be gone by then.”

“One good action isn’t nothing,” Bill points out. “You’re telling me you’re really gonna die?”

“Yes.”

“Like, genuinely die. Not burst into golden light and, I dunno, come back more Scottish.”

Missy rolls her eyes. “That’s not _always_ how regeneration works.”

Bill points out of the vault in the Doctor’s vague direction. “Coulda fooled me.”

“Yes, I’m going to die. It’s the only thing that makes sense; I have memories of murder.”

“I'm sure you do.”

“My own murder,” Missy clarifies, harsh.

“...That’s rough, buddy.”

“Not sure when or where it happens, but it does. I pull the trigger—I will—I did. Oh, I _despise_ this language; stupid accents, not enough tenses.” She selects her words precisely and delivers them like a Shakespearian actress. “I _will_ have _done_ it _when_ it _comes_.”

“I don’t understand,” Bill pointed her finger back and forth in the air, “Any of that. And I’m pretty damn smart, so you’re being obscure.”

“Willingly.”

“You’re gonna kill yourself?”

“Indirectly.”

“Couldn’t you just… choose not to?”

“No, because it already happened.”

“But,” Bill observes, “You’re right here.”

“It’s complicated.”

“I _bet_.”

“Don’t worry, though; you won’t have to think of it for long.” Missy smiles brightly and, without warning, hurls herself from the piano bench and pins Bill against the wall. 

This, of course, sends a kind of shameful thrill through Bill’s entire body, but it turns to fear when Missy curves her hands into two familiar gestures and tries to place them on either side of Bill’s face.

“Hey,” Bill says, struggling to no avail, “Hey!”

“So sorry,” says Missy sweetly, still trying to get her fingers to the proper spot (that’s what she said), “But a bit of a memory-wipe is in order here.”

And Bill, actually, is not completely distressed. ‘He does periodically oblige me’ is not something she actually wants to remember, nor is ‘Your whole life, it means nothing.’

“Why,” she half-shouts, though. “ _Why?!_ ”

“Oh, Bill,” Missy says, and Bill dimly registers that Missy actually did care to learn her name, “You said it yourself.”

“ _What?!_ ”

“I’m flat fucking evil.”

A few minutes later, Bill wakes up in the chair behind the Doctor’s desk, face-to-face with the picture of Susan. The Doctor is standing over her, sonic glasses whirring. “Memory wipe,” he hisses, and Bill realises he must have put her in the chair somehow, since she can’t remember sitting down on her own. She can’t remember the last ten minutes of her life, actually.

“Ten minutes or so,” the Doctor says, staring at a reading on his glasses. “Does that sound about right?”

“Ten minutes or—” Bill’s head is throbbing. “What?”

“Were you in the vault?” the Doctor kneels beside her, voice intense. “Bill, tell me, were you in the vault?”

Bill shifts—she was in a position that, while not uncomfortable, isn’t something she’d ever naturally sit in—and rubs her fingers into her temples. She looks around fuzzily. “Vault? There’s a vault here?”

“Never mind.” The Doctor stands and gives her a long look, then turns, and Bill sees Nardole standing awkwardly beside him.

“I’ll be right back,” the Doctor says. “Nardole, you watch her.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t call me sir.” The Doctor turns and strides out without another word, slamming the door behind him with a deafening thud.

Nardole hands Bill a glass of water. She takes it and chugs it down gratefully. Her headache subsides, replaced by a feeling like she’s just woken up from some horrible, confining dream.

“Should I ever take a philosophy class?” she asks Nardole.

Nardole visibly shudders. “No.”


	2. Chapter 2

The Doctor strides over to her, furious. “Missy,” he half-growls, anger etched in every line of his face. “Why did you wipe my friend’s memory?”

Missy looks up from where she’s been carefully arranging herself atop the piano for maximum seduction potential. She arches her back, scrunches her face, and speaks in her favourite provocative whisper, forcing the Doctor to slow down and lean close. “Because…” her lips are tantalising inches from his ear; she could _bite_ him. “I told her a _secret_.”

She pulls back and grins.

“What secret,” the Doctor demands, unamused.

Missy giggles and pulls his sunglasses off. “It’s a _secret_!”

“Give those back.” The Doctor reaches for them but Missy dangles them out of his reach, pinching them between her fingers in a way that makes it clear she could snap them. 

“What secret,” the Doctor repeats, his eyebrows knit. He’s pissed, probably thinks he looks threatening; Missy finds it adorable. She has height advantage on him from the piano and as soon as he opens his mouth to lecture her, she drops the glasses, takes his face in her hands, and kisses his nose with an audible smack. 

“That I care about you, silly,” she whispers, tugging him closer.

“That’s no secret.”

“Oh, sod off, then.” Missy drops first her smile and then the Doctor’s face. Half-theatrically, she swings her legs to the side and then heaves herself off the piano, right toward the Doctor’s arms. He doesn’t move out of her way, and, unable to stop, she crashes into him. Reflexively, he reaches out and holds her, bringing their faces close.

That hurts.

He doesn’t immediately move away, and she catches at his coat when he tries to. “Oh, you _treat_ ,” she soothes, twining her arm around the back of his neck and pushing her fingers up into his hair. “Doctor, dear?”

He’s weary of her already; his voice tells her that. “Yes, Missy?”

She tilts her head petulantly, regards him through confident, coquettish eyes. “Do you only visit me,” she strokes his chest, “Because you feel you need to?”

The Doctor doesn’t answer. After a moment, Missy goes cold. 

She extricates herself from his unresponsive body and starts to walk away from him, but in the vault she can’t go far. She curves her steps, circles him instead. He remains still, but she notes a tightening in his shoulders that indicates he feels unsafe. Still, he doesn’t track her paces with his eyes, even when she’s behind him—and that’s, quite frankly, insulting.

“Doctor,” she repeats, when she’s facing him again. Now she speaks to him as she would only speak to him: with honesty. He picks up on some of that; she hopes he does; but his face loses none of its wariness. If anything, it grows more distrustful.

She spits it out. “Doctor, do you actually believe I can change?”

There’s a long silence. Missy covers her face with her hand. 

Eventually, the Doctor replies. “Sometimes,” he says, voice low and reluctant, “Very rarely, impossible things just happen, and we call them miracles.”

“Impossible things,” Missy echoes. She lets out a bitter laugh. “Would it really be an impossible thing?”

“It would,” the Doctor says, with genuine pity. “Wouldn’t it?”

And Missy, already half-crying, snaps.

“Why don’t you _see_ me,” she shouts, and she’s grabbing him, shaking him, tears lit in her eyes, flushed practically down to her collarbone, throwing herself against him, beating it into him, one hand fisted in the fabric of his jacket, “ _Why don’t you see me_ ,” over and over, savage, broken, “WHY DON’T YOU _SEE_ ME” to his face, pulling him toward her and shoving him with all her strength, crying now, actually crying, tears smeared on her cheeks, wanting to _hurt_ him, her hand on his throat now, why don’t you see me, why don’t you _see_ me, why do you see the best in everyone but _me_ I am your friend I am your friend I am your friend why aren’t you _speaking—_

And she realises she’s choking him, that he isn’t speaking because he isn’t breathing, and she steps back and drops down hard into the nearest chair.

Silence falls. Dust drifts through the vault all over.

She wipes away her tears, and he stares at her as she’s filled with the deepest self-loathing she’s ever felt.

He doesn’t know, of course. He doesn’t know that she’s going insane in here, properly insane, completely unrelated to the sticky, giddy mannerisms she employs when she wants things. He can’t know that her nails are trimmed to the quick because she scratches herself when they’re not. He can’t know that she threw out her lipstick because it started to melt into blood. He can’t know that she thrashes under endless lists of names each night, and wakes to see spectres of faces. Dead faces, familiar faces, faces with eyes dripping out of their sockets and brain dripping out of their ears. A boy with metal sticks in his chest. A girl with her skin burnt off. She sees her past self, sometimes, young like he used to be, his arm extended toward her. She threw a chair at him once (self-care), and he smiled.

(Then the Doctor came running in at the noise and told her not to be so violent.)

They’re hallucinations, but they feel more real than anything else she can muster, and the more she searches her memories of the woman who shoved her against the wall on the Mondasian ship—the woman she remembers killing—the more sure she is that it’s her. But the Doctor doesn’t know that either.

And he can’t.

Back in the present, she catches her breath. Like a pathetic little child, she sniffs.

Underneath Missy, she’s the Master. Underneath the Master, she’s Koschei. She knows that; she has no choice _but_ to know that. She has no choice but to carry him, that bundle of ambition, his spirit, that love, inside her. It’s clear for the Doctor to see, if he wants to. It’s in the way she reaches for him, the way she carries on around him, cavorts around him, copies him. Koschei is obsessive. Devoted.

And freed.

Missy lets herself sink into memories.

When Theta left, she wasn’t there. It was just him and Arkytior, the old man and the young girl, the first two Time-Lords to turn renegade and run. It shocked Gallifrey; it _shook_ Gallifrey. The idea that Time-Lords weren’t the pinnacle of civilisation, the idea that there was life beyond them that was worth something, that was worth _seeing_ … That idea was brave. That idea was shockingly brave.

But it was cruel.

She spoke to him just days before he headed off. Long before he left the planet, he left her; these were the first words they’d exchanged in years to have any emotion at all. She didn’t say “Stay,” or “Please,” or anything trite and loving like that. She said what mattered. She asked “Why.”

And he didn’t answer. And he never has.

And she’s always wondered, a bit quietly, if—despite all their camaraderie, all their unbarbed back-and-forth banter—if the Doctor had left because he was scared of her, or scared of becoming like her. If he had sensed the depth of the corrosion in her, the madness, the coldness, the unblunted ambition of someone who has nothing to lose because they see life as kill or be killed, as hurt or be hurt, as break or be broken. She wonders if he saw that in himself, too, and ran before it overtook him. She wonders what would have happened if he’d taken her along.

And she’s always wondered, too, if she were the first person ‘the Doctor’ tried to heal—or just the first person he failed to.

She loved him like a monomaniac, like a dictator, like blunt-force trauma. He told her he’d leave, but not that he wouldn’t come back, and she waited for years for nothing. But even after that, when she ran into him on Earth once she’d changed and stopped dressing in colour, her hearts—his hearts—would beat faster, as if to say, ‘after all this time, it’s you; despite all this time, it’s you.’

“I’ll love you forever,” she’d told Theta once, in a fit of childish romance.

“Not forever,” Theta had said reasonably. “I mean, I’ll be a new person at some point.”

“I’ll still be yours.”

Theta had blinked. “I don’t wanna own you, Kosch.”

“Why not?”

Later Koschei would confess to him, haltingly, embarrassed and abashed, that there were parts of his own soul he hated, parts of him that wanted to stick knives between ribs just to see what would happen, parts of him that wanted to plunge hands into boiling water to watch flesh swell and redden. He’d tell Theta, ashamed, that he didn’t just want to _unseat_ the High Council; he wanted to destroy it. And flame was delightful, and blood was delightful, and obedience to him was best.

Koschei had looked at the world around him and it had stifled him, choked him. He wanted to kick it down and build it back better because he genuinely thought he could, and he wanted Theta to do it with him. But Theta ran from the world instead. And ‘the Doctor’ ran from Theta.

Time-Lords pick their name according to what they want to be. A doctor is learned, knowledgeable, curious, clinical, precise. Theta wanted those traits, and Koschei wanted Theta. (Among other things, of course, including but not limited to world domination.)

When Koschei picked his name, years before he took it on, he told Theta first, and Theta laughed and said “You’re joking.” When Koschei shook his head, Theta shrugged and hugged him anyway. He thought the name was dumb, but he took it as a symptom of something beyond Koschei, some sickness or brokenness that wasn’t his friend’s fault. He held on to that illusion for years; he might still be holding on to it. So one night, under the Gallifrey sky, ‘the Master’ sought the Doctor out and the Doctor went to bed with him, held onto him without remorse until they were both breathless.

“I fucked you,” Missy says, crass and brutal, her fingers pressed into her eyes against the memory. “I kissed you.”

“I remember,” the Doctor replies, not without amusement. “I was there.”

And Missy takes that tiny shred of mirth as hope and raises her head to look at him.

“That’s not the worst part.” Her throat is raw. “I loved you.”

The Doctor doesn’t seem surprised.

“I want to know,” she says with an attempt at evenness. Her voice wobbles, cracks like bone. “One thing.” She stands, inclines her head, meets his cold stare with her hot one. “I’ve known you longer than anyone else; I am owed that.”

“You’re owed nothing, Missy.”

“I’m owed this.”

She levels her gaze. “I want to know what I mean to you, Doctor. One command, one order, and you will obey it. _Tell me_. Visiting me, talking to me, doing the—the other things.”

“You mean—”

She brings her hand up. “Don’t.”

The Doctor goes silent. 

“Dealing with me,” she says at last. “Is it just a chore?”

She waits with growing patience, and the Doctor bridges the distance between them, reaching out and cupping the side of her face.

She hisses into the touch, covers his hand with her own, twisting her spine to curve toward him.

He strokes her cheekbone. She gasps aloud, and he presses his forehead to hers and then kisses her slowly, devoutly.

She kisses him back with all the love in her. He pulls away.

“Oh, Missy,” he says, with infinite compassion. “You were always a chore.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the record, this is set when twelve is blind, which, of course, makes the 'why don't you see me' scene just a little bit worse.


End file.
